Obama’s Syria Policy and the Illusion of US Power in the Middle East

With the collapse of the US-Russian ceasefire agreement and the resumption
and escalation of the massive Russian bombing campaign in Aleppo, the frustration
of hawks in Washington over the failure of the Obama administration to use American
military power in Syria has risen to new heights.

But the administration’s inability to do anything about Russian military escalation
in Aleppo is the logical result of the role the Obama administration has been
playing in Syria over the past five years.

The problem is that the administration has pursued policy objectives that it
lacked the means to achieve. When Obama called on President Bashar al-Assad
to step down in September 2011, the administration believed, incredibly, that
he would do so of his own accord. As former Hillary Clinton aide and Pentagon
official Derek Chollet reveals in his new book, The Long Game, “[E]arly
in the crisis, most officials believed Assad lacked the necessary cunning and
fortitude to stay in power.”

Administration policymakers began using the phrase “managed transition” in
regard to US policy toward the government, according to Chollet. The phrase
reflected perfectly the vaulting ambitions of policymakers who were eager to
participate in a regime change that they saw as a big win for the United States
and Israel and a big loss for Iran.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would be out front pushing for a United
Nations Security Council resolution calling for a “transition” in Syria.

But US regional Sunni allies – Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia – would provide
the arms to Syrian fighters. The only US role in the war would be a covert operation
devised by then CIA director David Petraeus to provide intelligence and logistical
assistance to those allies, to get arms to the groups chosen by the Sunni regimes
that would pay for them.

Of course there were those, led by Clinton herself, who wanted to go further
and create a “no-fly zone” where the insurgents could be trained and operate
freely. But Obama, supported by the US military leadership, would not support
that invitation to war. The US was going to play the great power role in Syria
without getting its hands dirty with the arming of an opposition force.

But within a few months it was already clear that the administration’s “managed
transition” had gone terribly wrong. Al-Qaeda, firmly ensconced in Iraq, had
begun to show its hand in a series of attacks in Damascus and elsewhere in Syria.
By August 2012, it was widely recognized that the jihadists were rapidly taking
over the anti-Assad war.

Ed Hussein of the Council on Foreign Relations observed in the Christian Science
Monitor that Syria was becoming “a magnet for jihadis globally,” just as Iraq
had become after the US invasion. The Defense Intelligence Agency identified
al-Qaeda, the Salafists and the Muslim Brotherhood as the three major strains
in the rapidly growing anti-Assad war.

Furthermore the administration knew that Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia were
sending weapons, including shoulder-launched antitank RPGs not to secular groups
but to Islamic extremist groups in Syria, who were bound to work with al-Qaeda
and other jihadists. Chollet, who was working on Syria for Clinton’s policy
planning office and later moved to the Pentagon, recalls that the administration
was “concerned” that “the wrong elements of the opposition – the extremists,
some affiliated with al-Qaeda, were being strengthened”.

‘Skin in the game’

One might expect the administration then to call a halt to the whole thing
and clamp down on its allies, especially Turkey, which was the main entry point
for arms pouring into Syria. Instead, as Chollet recounts, Clinton and the then
CIA director, Leon Panetta, were pushing for a major CIA program to create,
train and arm a Syrian opposition force – not because it would prove decisive
to the outcome but because it would give the United States “leverage” with its
Sunni allies by acquiring “skin in the game”.

Obama rejected that argument about “leverage” in 2012, but then reversed himself
in 2013 under the pressure of the allegations of use of chemical weapons by
the government. Like so much of what passes for justification of aggressive
US military and paramilitary activities around the world, the argument made
no sense. The leverage the United States has with Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia
is the range of political-military and economic benefits that each of them derives
from a formal or de facto alliance with the United States.

I asked Chollet recently why the CIA’s ginning up our own anti-Assad forces
in Syria would give the United States more “leverage” over Sunni allies. His
reply was: “Because then the whole thing would collapse around us!”

But of course the growing US “skin in the game” didn’t give the administration
leverage over the Sunni allies’ policies in Syria; it did exactly the opposite,
making the US complicit in the Sunni project of using the jihadists and Salafists
to maximize the pressure for the overthrow of the Syrian regime. Not a shred
of evidence has ever surfaced suggesting that the US has done anything to pressure
its allies to cut off the channels of arms that were strengthening the al-Qaeda-linked
militant group, al-Nusra Front.

As a result, the Sunni arms-to-jihadists strategy and the US support for “moderates”
were two parts of a broader political-diplomatic strategy of pressure on Assad
to step down. As former US ambassador Robert Ford observed in February 2015,
“For a long time” the administration had “looked the other way” while the US-supported
forces were coordinating with Nusra Front.

Russian intervention

That strategy was upended when the Russians intervened forcefully in September
2015. Obama, who was firmly committed to avoiding any direct conflict with Russia
over Syria, vetoed any threat to use force in Syria in response to the Russian
intervention. For almost a year, Obama relied on cooperation with the Russians
as his primary political-diplomatic strategy for managing the conflict, producing
two ceasefires that ultimately failed.

The fate of those two ceasefires has revealed more fully the illusory nature
of the great power role the US has pretended to play this past year. Kerry committed
the United States to two ceasefire agreements based on the premise that the
United States could separate the armed groups that the CIA had armed and trained
from the Nusra Front-led military command. The reality was that the United States
had no real power over those groups because they were more heavily dependent
on their jihadist allies than on the United States for their continued viability.

But underlying that failure is the larger reality that the Obama administration
has allowed its policy in Syria to be determined primarily by the ambitions
of its Sunni allies to overthrow Assad. The administration has claimed that
it never favored the destruction of Syrian institutions, but that claim is contradicted
by its acquiescence in the Sunni allies’ support of Nusra Front.

US complicity in the hundreds of thousands of deaths in the Syrian war, and
now in the massive civilian casualties in the Russian bombing of Aleppo, does
not consist in its refusal to go to war in Syria but in its providing the political-diplomatic
cover for the buildup of the al-Nusra Front and its larger interlocking system
of military commands.

A US administration that played a true superpower role would have told its
allies not to start a war in Syria by arming jihadists, using the fundamentals
of the alliance as the leverage. But that would have meant threatening to end
the alliance itself if necessary – something no US administration is willing
to do. Hence the paradox of US power in the Middle East: in order to play at
the role of hegemon in the region, with all those military bases, the United
States must allow itself to be manipulated by its weaker allies.